To Kill A Mockingbird/Broadway Thoughts

There is no doubt this story is still relevant in 2019. I applauded it when I heard it was happening and I was very excited to see how Bart Sher and Aaron Sorkin would interpret the classic novel (especially considering the current adaptation for the stage is some what of a bore). I have tremendous respect for both their talents. But in all honesty, this is a miss on almost all artistic fronts.  It's interesting, Sorkin is a master screen and television writer, but his passion, playwrighting is just not in the scope of his natural abilities.  He resorts to the three children (played by adults who skirt the look of children from the stage) sharing the narration of most of the plays action.  It's a device most playwrights use in their first play, a device that usually has to be beaten out of writers by tough writing professors. The result is shockingly amateur. Sher has them fully stepping forward and addressing the audience, so it's unclear who they are talking to and what the point of the device is. Important moments of action in the play (the falling action) is told to us instead of actually seen.  I'm still trying to wrap my brain around what they wanted to accomplish with this idea. To add insult, the humor is trite and sophomoric. It garners self concious chuckles from the audience at best. 

Sher, whose work in straight drama is usually exquisitely staged in a way where every movement has meaning loses his way here. The result is as if a summer stock director ran out of time and the actors just had to fill in the space themselves.  He also usually works closely with his designer to find a hidden subtext in the way it moves or looks...Miriam Beuther's set looks like it was rushed and falls back on the plain looking porch you see in every high school production. Sher starts having the cast move things in, but then the tracking system takes over half way through the production and moves a unit on and off. The unimaginative is palpable.

The cast is directed to mug for the most part, especially the three man children. Frederick Weller as Bob Ewell follows suit and makes you wonder if Sher told him what to do or went rogue with some odd voice that was vetoed the first week of rehearsal...it's not broadway caliber. Most of this cast is not. Actors are moving excessively for no apparent reason, taking strange paths to get from point A to point B. 

Something went wrong as this production reached rehearsals, I don't know if it was the stress of the lawsuit or what, but this is not the broadway production of this show anyone wants.

i did speak for myself, and I can have my own thoughts on my own thread, why does that offend you so much. I didn't know that you were part of the thread police

standingovation79 said: "i did speak for myself, and I can have my own thoughts on my own thread, why does that offend you so much. I didn't know that you were part of the thread police"

If everyone felt the need to start their own thread every time they have an opinion of a show, we'd literally have hundreds of threads on each show all incredibly repetitive, with little actual meaningful conversation cause people would quickly tire from having to type the same reply in 60 different threads. It would also be almost impossible for someone to get a consensus of what the people here thought of a show without spending hours reading dozens and dozens of threads. That's why almost everyone else doesn't do that. But you do you.

I got the fancy version of my laptop. You know, the one that comes with a scroll bar.

Serious question: what is "falling action"? Aristotle neglected to mention it.

dramamama611 said: "Falling action is what happens after the climax. What hapoens because of the climax. Its a thing often discussed in short stories."

It did catch me a bit off guard that it was told to us rather than shown, but the way Sorkin set everything up, it made perfect sense and worked 

"He resorts to the three children (played by adults who skirt the look of children from the stage) sharing the narration of most of the plays action.  It's a device most playwrights use in their first play, a device that usually has to be beaten out of writers by tough writing professors. The result is shockingly amateur. Sher has them fully stepping forward and addressing the audience, so it's unclear who they are talking to and what the point of the device is."

Ok, I have a couple things to say about this...

What do you mean by "it's unclear who they are talking to"? You just said they are addressing the audience directly. They are talking to the audience. It's no more complicated than that.

No, this is not a device that has to be beaten out of writers by their teachers. Can it be overused? Sure, but The Glass Menagerie employs a very similar device. Having gone to drama school, I can assure you that I was not taught to never use narration, but instead I was taught how to use it effectively, something which I think Sorkin does very well. Jem, Scout, and Dill are never just relaying facts for the sake of relaying facts--they are struggling to understand, they are telling each other stories, they are correcting each other, and they are observing each other's stories.

As for the ages of the actors playing the children, this has been discussed elsewhere, but Sorkin's adaptation has the main three characters looking back and reexamining stories from their youth. They are adults going back in time to explore in greater depth the things that they didn't fully understand as children. They are therefore played by adults, but adults who have the capacity to remember and embody what being a child is like. If you reread Harper Lee's novel, you will find that it is similarly narrated by an older Scout looking back on her past. Even the film has voiceover narration from an older Scout.

As for the pieces of the denouement which are dramatized vs narrated, the events which Sorkin chooses to put on stage are the ones which he feels are most important. By not staging the death of Ewell but instead staging the aftermath, Sorkin focus's the climax of the play on Atticus's decision to say that Ewell fell on his knife (an event also stressed by the opening lines of the play). This is because for Sorkin, the story is not about the preponderance of violent, prejudiced acts, but how we respond to them as we grow up and learn that the world isn't quite so black and white.

You can argue with Sorkin's adaptational choices, but the assumption that the choices were arbitrary, slapdash, and amateurish is not giving him or his collaborators the credit they deserve. Artists working at this caliber make every choice intentionally. Refusing to engage with the questions of how their decisions relate to the effects they hoped to make is not criticism, it's complaining.

Updated On: 1/7/19 at 03:59 PM